Pierre-François Divier

Fine piece of reading, recalling the legal hunt for Jacques Chirac as Mayor of Paris (1977-1995). Chirac, after serving two terms as President of the French Republic (1995-2007), during which he was constitutionally immune from prosecution, was finally convicted in December 2011. He had been found guilty of employing fictitious employees at the Parisian tax payer's expense. In its heyday, Chirac's cabinet counted no less than 900 collaborators ! In reality, they worked for him personally, or for the RPR party, and not for the city.

After reading through the author's personal struggle against the confusion of private and public interest, one is struck by the alleged wide-spread nature of Chirac's practices ("fictitious jobs", housing at the taxpayers' expense). When the PS was in power in the 1980s, 1990s or (at the Parisian level) the 2000s, no efforts were undertaken to activate public prosecution against Chirac. Why ? Because similar affairs were menacing the left as well as the right main party... The portrait of public prosecutors is without any concession: they are mere servants of their political masters, and will ultimately bow before instructions from the Garde des Sceaux or the Presidency. They smother complaints against politicians, and will never act against those in power. Procedurally, the only access to justice left over is the complaint by a victim ("partie civile") with an investigation judge ("juge d'instruction"), who can then conduct an independent inquiry. The author, a consumerist activist lawyer associated to the green party, seems embittered with the state of the rule of law in France. In his eyes, only the investigation judge is sufficiently independent from political power to act.

Whereas a jurist's normal reaction to leaks in the press would be to deplore the violation of the secret of the investigation, Divier actually indicated that this is the only possible way to put pressure on politicians able to fend off legal assaults... If one reads verbal hearing transcripts in Le Monde or Libération, this is more a sign of despair from the prosecution in an endless struggle with an armada of lawyers defending a politician or businessman.

In the end, the reader wonders whether Chirac's "affaires" were so serious at all. In the case of the use of "ficticious electors" in the 3rd Parisian district at the 1989 municipal elections, the author has to admit the accused mayor had done nothing wrong (members of his family were convicted, the RPR party was clearly involved, but the main person accused by the lawyer -for years- apparently not). Divier, however, has the lucidity to recall the monthly amounts of tax payers' money received by party collaborators, or the ridiculously low rent paid by the Chirac family in their posh 7th district "pied-à-terre". This reignites the readers' indignation. The contrast between an "emploi fictif", on the one hand, and massive unemployment in France, on the other, is a useful way to make the feeling of injustice more concrete.

Moreover, going through this book gives the impression that nothing has changed in France. Politicians are in no way out of the game when convicted in a court of law (Juppé, Cambadélis, Pasqua...). The examples are notorious. Public opinion forgives them. Former president Sarkozy's aggressive and populist attacks on magistrates as left-wing activists and permissive softies seem not so much out of touch with Mitterrand's handling of "les affaires". Attacking the independence of the judicial power is seen with complaisance by French public opinion. What difference between the clientelism of Chirac twenty years ago and, today, Sarkozy's affaires, those of Balkany, or of the Parti Socialiste's sections in the North or Marseille ?

The pleasure of reading is somewhat hampered by the continuous apologetic ego-trip of the author, who at times appears to have been negligent in the conduct of proceedings ("If only I had gone to Strasbourg"... "If only I did not allow the deadline for appeal to lapse") and incessantly refers to internal quarrels within the Green Party. The book appears to have been written rather quickly, causing sometimes irritating redundancies (e.g. the author's reference to the procedure whereby he could substitute a random elector to the Parisian municipality to proceed in court for damages: "that procedure from the 19th century" => as a legal historian, I do not consider this as "antique" at all...). Divier prints extracts from judicial sentences to support his point. Yet, the reader can develop some sympathy for the judges in question, as Chirac's opponents often drafted their pleadings on the basis of no more than newspaper articles ("There must be something wrong out there..."). However, when, after extremely long delays, the proofs finally come out, the inevitable question of conflict of interest resurfaces. Everybody seemed to have been aware of Chirac's massive harm infliction on the public interest, but it took a militant lone rider to bring the case to court.… (mehr)